


Red Bull and Pringles

by cat_77



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Major Character Injury, Natasha is a badass
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 22:01:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1099089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cat_77/pseuds/cat_77
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone had a vice, hers just proved far more dangerous than it really needed to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red Bull and Pringles

**Author's Note:**

> For the "wild card" square at hc_bingo. I chose "bullet wounds" as the prompt.
> 
> * * *

It was a vice, she knew this. Vices were bad for you, she knew this as well. Everyone indulged in something from time to time, she was certain of it. This just happened to be something she liked and had ready access to. She had known better, but had not cared and now she rather silently cursed the whole thing.

These were the thoughts that ran through Natasha’s head as the world around her slowly faded to the black of the dirt upon which she currently lay. It was not exactly soft dirt, but she had definitely had worse in her days. Perhaps it was the fact that it was so recently tilled that made the difference.

Her mind was wandering again, so she tried to focus it. The Red Bull she had stopped to purchase would have helped with that. The Pringles probably would not, but she knew for a fact that many a long car ride had been made better by the existence of that small silver can of liquid energy. She blamed a certain ex-handler for introducing her to such things. While he preferred sugar-coated, preservative-laden dough, she went right towards the cans of taurine and salt.

Her most recent car ride had not actually been that long. She had checked in with a contact regarding a few key issues, and then took the scenic route back through upstate New York. The tank had been far from empty, but it was never a bad thing to top it off, especially when there was a chance for some completely unhealthy sustenance that could be consumed and disposed of long before she returned to the tower with none the wiser.

The station she had chosen was the only thing around for miles save for a sleepy town with two bars and a church, and it was located just past the edge of the county line. She got her half a tank of gas and went inside to both pay and peruse, and that was when everything went to hell.

She had been distracted. She was the Black Widow, she should never be distracted and this was a prime example of why. But she had been distracted and lax in her awareness of her surroundings and was contemplating her less than healthy snacks and the gorgeous drive and the actually quite relaxing lunch she had shared with her old contact and how well life in general had been going so recently with friends and colleagues she could trust and so her hand was not on any discernible weapon when she opened the door to the seemingly mostly abandoned gas station.

The shot took her by surprise, the bullet tearing through her skin and possibly nicking bone before it buried itself soundly just beneath her ribcage. She careened backwards, the doorframe against her left shoulder and hip the only thing that stopped her from falling outright for a few precious seconds. The relative silence from earlier was now broken by the ringing of her ears and the sound of voices overlapping, one screaming and one insisting it was an accident, that he didn’t mean to, that he would make it better.

She pushed herself forward, used the rusted metal frame as a launch point, pain whiting out her vision but fueling her at the same time. She pushed past the pain, had a metal hook from one of the displays in hand as her guns were still in the car and it had been readily available, and prepared to take the man down. The back part of her mind amended that, took in the fact that he was no man, barely older than a boy, with wide eyes and a trembling chin and a hunting rifle in his hands with cash fluttering around him on the floor.

She altered her attack from destroy to disable and managed to land her hook in his thigh, take advantage of his surprise, and almost grab his weapon away from him. That was when the second man with the second rifle knocked her soundly across the back of the skull and the white exploded into red.

She swam her way back to consciousness much more slowly than usual. She had a vague memory of movement, of pain exemplified, of the sticky cloyingness of her own clothing against her skin. There was something else that was cloying as well, though. She took a shallow breath and felt moist plastic move closer, try to suffocate her, try to cling to her nose and mouth that much more closely. There was an underlying feel of dust and dirt and the faint taste of charcoal against her lips and tongue.

She no longer knew which hurt the worst: the gunshot wound, the head wound, or the fact that she was nearly bested by those idiotic enough to mistake unconsciousness with death and who now apparently planned to bury her semi-alive.

There were still voices. The younger one was sobbing and the elder one was cursing and there were underlying promises that everything was going to be okay, that they were fixing this, that they had the money and everything would be alright, interspersed with the sound of a shovel striking the dirt again and again.

That brought her back to the now. To the need to escape before said escape became far more difficult. The station owner was most certainly dead, either in fact or equivalent due to the men's need to cover their tracks. The plastic wrapped around her was likely from the display of charcoal briquettes that had been just outside the station door. It was the wrong size and the wrong shape and was not wrapped as tightly around her as it could have been even though her own weight seemed to pin it in place and restrict her movement.

One voice asked if the hole was deep enough and the other said to keep going, which meant that she had a limited window in which to act. She had a knife in each boot, but could reach neither at the moment. The buckle on her belt was sharpened, but she rather thought the leather as a whole might be helping to hold her insides in place, so she passed on that as well. Instead, she shifted her wrists closer together and felt for the bracelet the idiots had not thought to remove.

Clint had given it to her in Bahrain. It fit her cover then and she had seen no need to dispose of it as it was quite the useful piece of engineering. The silver band was inscribed with whorls and dots that held meaning to only the artist, but the large cabochon in the center actually lifted to reveal a sort of locket that was perfect for holding a miniaturized set of lock picks and the stones on either side were slightly conical with the sharpened ends facing outward, yet not a risk to her wrist due to protection of the band itself. It was a weapon and a tool in one, all hidden in plain sight.

She used that tool now, first trying one of the stones and already shifting her other hand to try to get to the lock picks if needed to poke and saw through the covering. The stone worked though, and she was able to slice the plastic from waist to throat. She paused briefly, both to appreciate the cool night air that finally reached her lungs and to evaluate if the sound had been registered by her assailants. They were still bickering though, the younger one asking how he was going to explain the wound to his leg and to ask if he was going to need a tetanus shot, and the elder one telling him to focus on digging and they would worry about the rest once the situation was taken care of.

The situation was of course Natasha and she was far from taken care of. She wasn’t standing, not yet. She ached far too much for that for now and feared the bloodloss had made her quite dizzy and the head wound was not helping in that matter. Instead, she freed herself from the plastic and rolled as quickly as she dared to the side, letting the natural darkness of the night provide cover.

The plastic had made noise, an odd wet crinkle of a sound, as she moved across it and that the men finally heard. It took them a stupidly long time to figure out the source of the noise, and she used that to her advantage. One of them was dumb enough to leave his rifle propped up against a tree while he dug, though the other still had his close at hand. She reached the abandoned one before the man thought to look for it, busy as he was shouting about how she wasn’t dead because there wasn’t such things as zombies and where did she go and then falling oddly silent as he realized the implications of the woman he shot and was going to bury still being alive.

There was some major kickback with the rifle, but her aim was true and she had successfully damaged the other one in ways that made it extremely unsafe to fire. There was only one barrel potentially still loaded, but two men still standing. She was in no way surprised when her next shot simply clicked, but at least had the structure of the weapon itself to use against the man closest to her. A swipe of his feet that was much more like a hack just below his knees and he hit the dirt, head connecting solidly with the tangled roots of the surrounding trees and sending him in a dazed spiral towards unconsciousness. The second man dodged for a moment before he realized she was still grounded and stomped his foot downward on the barrel before kicking outward towards her obvious wound. 

Her breath burst quick and painful and her ears rang with both her heartbeat and his questioning of why she was still alive. She curled up on herself now, just for a moment, and it served to protect her from the next kick even while it allowed her to reach one of the blades in her boots. A slice to something vital and a lot of grappling later, and the hilt of her knife smacked against his head and let him join his companion in the darkness.

She took a moment to breathe, to ready herself for another attack, to assess her wounds and to determine that the bloodloss might well be too great to get to safety on her own in a timely manner. She then took a moment to flop less than gracefully back to the comforting dirt when her shaking arms no longer had the strength to hold her remotely upright. She didn’t dare lay there too long though, the urge to drift off was far too strong. Instead, she patted herself down and found that the idiots had at least done one thing correctly as she had no phone nor car keys anywhere about her.

She forced herself to crawl over to the nearest man and dig through his pockets to find that he had a phone with a quarter charge. It wasn’t her own, but it would have to do. It was an older model, and he hadn’t bothered with a password lock, so it was relatively easy to dial the first number that came to mind. She typed in the various passcodes and managed a voiceprint as well, even though her words sounded harsh to her own ears. She was soon rewarded with the dulcet tones of Stark’s AI, which asked, “How may I assist you, Agent Romanov?”

“Can you get a lock on this location?” she asked.

“Triangulating now,” JARVIS confirmed. Then, almost hesitantly in a way that reminded her just how advanced the programing was, he asked, “If I may say, Agent Romanov, your voice sounds strained, is there further assistance I may provide?”

“Unless you can get a team to backwoods New York before I bleed out, I doubt it,” she admitted. She didn’t know why she had even bothered to call. Perhaps she had grown close enough to the others to have some sort of innate need to let them mourn her in their desired methods. Perhaps she had just wanted a friendly voice beside her as her ledger was finally reviewed. It was a weakness, but one no one would call her on save for herself.

The next voice she heard was not that of the AI, and it was all too familiar. “Nat? Natasha? Where the hell are you? Wait, JARVIS is sending the information now. We should be there soon.”

“Good to hear,” she replied, and wondered why she slurred.

There were more words, most of them profanity, but they were drowned out by a quick three-four beep as apparently a quarter charge on a piece of crap phone meant about five minutes worth of use. She let the phone fall to the side, too heavy to hold on to anyway, and let her eyes drift upwards to where the faintest hint of the moon shone through the treetops. All things considered, it was at least a peaceful image to contemplate as she drifted towards letting go.

The scene was sharply different when she next awoke. There were voices again, men struggling to stand, complaining about their wounds and about their need to finish the job if nature didn’t take its course soon enough. She forced her eyes open to see the elder one, still bruised and bleeding, shovel in hand, raised and ready to either increase or complete her current agony. It never completed its downward stroke however, as he was interrupted by another voice, this one she would recognize anywhere, that demanded, “Put it down, asshole.”

She couldn’t turn her head, not completely. She tried anyway and felt her skull scrape against the shattered bark and tilled dirt that she lay upon. There was Barton, bowstring taut and ready, standing above her like some sort of guardian angel. Behind him, out of view but not of sound, were a cadre of others, bringing light and weaponry and hopefully medical care with them.

Steve strode forward and easily detained the two idiots so that Clint could lower his weapon, crouch beside her, and hold on. “I’ve got you,” he promised. He took some sort of package from someone she couldn’t quite see, and then her wound erupted into a new sort of cushioned torment. 

“Took you long enough,” she managed.

He smiled as if that was his due. He raised a hand now stained dark and liquid and brushed an annoying strand of hair out of her eyes, palm pausing to cup her cheek before it returned to assisting with the stopping her from bleeding out. She focused on trying to see the moon past the light, past the worried eyes, past all the commotion that surrounded her. She wasn’t sure if she was successful, but thought she saw a hint of gold amongst the black and considered it close enough.

 

**Epilogue:**

“They’re empty, aren’t they?” she guessed when Clint brought in the latest gift package.

She was propped up in her hospital bed, bandage over the where the bullet ripped through far more than her skin and a lump on the back of her head where she had been clipped by the rifle butt. Stark had already brought her nicer blankets and pillows insisting those that came with the room were a crime, and Bruce and Steve had already dropped off various bouquets of everything from flowers to teas to magazines. Thor had simply promised much mead to be consumed upon her release.

Clint, for his part, had been there pretty much any time she had been conscious yet still managed to sneak out and obtain what by his standards constituted a bouquet of his own. It was a metal lockbox filled with cans of three different flavors of Red Bull and four different flavors of Pringles. These were, of course, things she was not supposed to be granted quite yet. These were, of course, things she would much like to consume already.

“Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t,” he replied with as much mystery as he could manage, which was to say not much. Then, with a smile, he flipped down the lid, snapped the lock into place, and tossed the key over on top of a group of what looked to be petunias. “You get well enough to get that, you can have whatever’s in the box,” he promised.

“Or I could pick the lock,” she mused.

“True, you could,” he agreed.

“Please don’t?” Bruce sighed from the doorway. “The nursing staff already fears you, they don’t need to fear a caffeinated you as well.” He notably did not remove the key from the flowers, however.

Clint propped himself in a chair beside her, booted feet on Stark’s pretty blanket. “Get better?” he asked.

“Get bathed?” she countered with a knowing sniff. She had been there for three days. He had not been gone long enough for anything more than a splashdown in the attached bathroom.

“Please?” Bruce tried, joining in the game because he could.

Clint made a face, but got back up again. He made it all the way to the door before he reached in his pocket and tossed something her way. She caught it easily, stitches barely pulling with the movement and tried not to smile at his obviousness.

“What a pretty bracelet,” Bruce commented as he took the vacated chair when Clint finally slouched away. “Middle Eastern?”

Natasha slipped the gift onto her wrist and blinked with enough false innocence that even he should have been worried. “Yes, yes it is.”

 

End.


End file.
